Research Triangle Energy Consortium

Barry hung up his earthly bicycle clips a few days ago.  He will be remembered for many things, but mostly for being Barry.  By some measures he was the quintessential Aussie.  A farmer in the pre-Amazon days, who got by with what was available and with a skill acquired in the school of hard knocks.  Failure was a luxury ill afforded.  The impossible simply took longer.  This frontier mentality was not unique to Barry, but it was manifest at an exceptional level.  Not having been at his side over the years, I have but a few examples.  I suspect they will suffice.

Lest Barry come across as some sort of paragon, we will begin with one of his foibles.  Barry was a believer in the circular economy before it came into vogue.  The starkest manifestation was that Barry never saw any roadside trash that he did not see as useful. That it came in handy when he needed to walk on water (all will be revealed shortly) is just the sort of encouragement that he did not need.  Would that our foibles were all this harmless.

Barry is testimony to the fact that inventiveness is not the purview of only the highly educated.  As with many farmers, including his parents, Barry went to work on the farm prior to finishing high school.  When a portion of the citrus orchard needed new planting, the saplings were widely spaced to account for their girth when they would be fully grown.  Watering was still done with overhead “monsoons”.  He decided to grow vegetables in the medians in part to put the water falling on the medians to use; shrewd but not innovative.  Carrots were chosen for market demand and minimal spoilage.  The soft texture of raised beds favored the root vegetable’s growth condition. But what nailed it was his innovation to eschew a single wide raised bed. He decided that parallel narrow beds afforded the carrot roots less compaction by being close to edges.  Many bountiful harvests rewarded this thinking.

A defining trait was his love of bicycling.  Even well into his eighties, a 17 km ride each way to town to pick up the newspaper was a mere bagatelle.  An 80 km ride celebrated that milestone birthday.  When he mentioned to us last year that they had joined the Meals on Wheels program, we expressed surprise that the program delivered out to their place.  It did not. He biked in with an insulated pack to fetch the food.  Meals on wheels, yes, but his wheels.  Of course.

Now to the walking on water mentioned earlier.  You were no doubt thinking of this figuratively.  Even though the country is fondly known as Oz, wizardry is not expected.  However, hark back to that “the impossible simply takes longer” ethos.  The town embraced that with a “walk on water” competition at an annual event.  There were rules regarding use of only commonplace materials, cost limits, and the like.  The devices were to be affixed to the feet and a traverse on top of the water was required for several meters.  Even Barry had suffered the wet fate of others in prior years.  But one year fortune handed him litter, which when combined with assorted objects in his collection, produced the triumphant traverse. Indomitable comes to mind.  And yet, he was the gentlest of souls, thinking well of people as the default option even against mounting evidence. His glass was always half full. 

He was just being Barry.

Barry G. H. Goddard   1937 – 2026

Vikram Rao